‘Escape From East Berlin,’ Reissued Five Decades Later

Robert Siodmak’s “Escape From East Berlin” (1962).CreditWarner Bros. Home Entertainment

Scores of film artists fled Nazi Germany during the 1930s and found their way to Hollywood. Only a handful of these refugees returned after World War II to make German-language films.

The actor Peter Lorre directed a single feature, “The Lost One,” in which he also starred, in West Germany in 1951. Fritz Lang made his last three movies, released in 1959 and 1960, in German. But Robert Siodmak (1900-1973) was the Hollywood refugee who most doggedly tried to restart his career as a German-language director.

The results were mixed, although “The Rats” (1955), which updated a Gerhart Hauptmann play, won a Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and “The Devil Strikes at Night” (1957), about a serial killer in Hamburg during the war, was nominated for an Academy Award for best foreign-language film.

Unmatched for topicality, however, was Mr. Siodmak’s West German-American coproduction “Escape From East Berlin” (1962). This Cold War artifact, newly available on DVD from Warner Archive, was inspired by the escape of 29 East Germans who tunneled to the West beneath the Berlin Wall in January 1962, only months after its construction. (Unlike theirs, most tunnels were dug from the west to the east to provide a way for East Berliners to flee.)

Siodmak’s thriller begins with a documentary account of the construction of the Berlin Wall and various attempts to escape from “the prison state of Communism.” Heading a mostly German cast is Don Murray, a Hollywood actor known for cowboy roles who gamely employs an unlikely accent as the East German chauffeur who leads the escape. He lives with a fractious extended family in a dilapidated house, an oasis of warmth and coziness surrounded by nosy neighbors and conveniently located across the street from the wall.

Murray’s character, Kurt, who is romancing the wife of his bigwig boss, a military officer, is satisfied with his life in East Germany. But when a colleague crashes a truck into the wall in a futile effort to break through to the other side, it falls to him to comfort the man’s younger sister (Christine Kaufmann), a bright-eyed gamine who is similarly determined leave the East. Although Kurt has no wish to escape, he is persuaded to dig the necessary tunnel — a project that, attracting other desperate characters, involves considerable intrigue.

“Striking Germanic direction by Robert Siodmak compensates for a weak script,” Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote of the film, which opened on a double bill with another Christine Kaufmann vehicle, “Swordsman of Siena.”

Despite its Cold War clichés, “Escape From East Berlin” has thoughtful camera angles and builds in anguished suspense. With its drab, scarred film locations (actually in West Berlin) and nocturnal mises-en-scène, it synthesizes aspects of the films noirs that established Siodmak’s Hollywood reputation as well as his first movie, the collective production “People on Sunday,” based on the real lives of its amateur actors and written with his brother Curt Siodmak from a screenplay by Billy Wilder.

Although Robert Siodmak didn’t care much for “Escape From East Berlin,” which he described as an exercise in “tedious liberalism,” it is easy to imagine some personal investment. The director — a Jew who left Berlin for Paris after Joseph Goebbels demanded that one of his films be banned and who left France for the United States the day before World War II broke out — was himself something of an escape artist.

The wall had two sides, and, even as a 500-foot-long facsimile was being built in West Berlin’s Tiergarten for Siodmak’s “Escape,” East German directors were being urged to give their perspective on what East Germany called its “anti-fascist rampart.”

Two features, Frank Vogel’s “And Your Love Too” (1962), and Gerhard Klein’s “Sunday Drivers” (1963), have been released with ancillary material, like a 1962 propaganda documentary, as a DVD set by the Filmmuseum München and partners.

Vogel’s film, the more ambitious and successful of the two, seems to have been made under the influence of Alain Resnais’s “Hiroshima Mon Amour” (1959). Retrospective voice-overs and documentary inserts are deployed in the service of an anxiously apocalyptic, politically charged romantic triangle involving two adoptive brothers competing for the affections of Eva, a winsome mail carrier.

One brother (Ulrich Thein) is cynical and self-serving (not unlike the Murray character at the start of “Escape From East Berlin”). The other (played by Armin Mueller-Stahl, who would emigrate to the West in 1980), is an honest, socially responsible ham-radio enthusiast in frequent contact with comrades in Cuba. The good brother is called up to defend the border when the wall is erected, giving the bad one the opportunity to get Eva pregnant and setting up a melodramatic crisis at the demarcation between East and West.

“Sunday Drivers” is an uneasy road comedy in which disgruntled “bourgeois remnants” set out from Leipzig for Berlin, where they plan to sell their cars and cross to the West. Having left on Aug. 13, 1961, the day that construction of the wall began, they are thwarted when the roads to Berlin are blocked. Like “And Your Love Too,” it has a jazzy score, much talk of impending war and an ending with the chimera of a rational, radiant Communist future.

(The films are subtitled in English, and the two-disc set can be ordered from edition-filmmuseum.com. The format, All-Region PAL, does not work on all DVD players but is compatible with most computers.)

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